#wearabletech #smartworld

It’s clear that smart watches and fitness bands will eventually give way to a far more comfortable, subtle wearable—a temporary tattoo that you barely notice is there because it stretches and bends with your skin. The first generation of such stickers are coming out this year from L’Oreal and others. Much work has been done on making flexible sensors that can fit unobtrusively in such devices. Last year I tried out some of the sensors coming out of John Rogers’ research group at the University of Illinois that measure blood pressure, analyze sweat, and detect muscle activity. At this point, the commercial skin-like sensors don’t have their own displays. Instead, they communicate with a smart phone and an app on the phone presents the data. That’s not ideal for, say, runners who want to easily check their pulse rate or diabetics who are monitoring sugar levels with more com...